Justin Currie, The Great War (Ryko, 2010)

There can be no doubt that The Great War is a Justin Currie creation. It is populated by songs which reflect classic Currie style, from his standard thematic preoccupations to recognizable chord progressions and modes of orchestration. While patterns may be discernable to a long-time Del Amitri and Justin Currie fan, however, their presence does not reflect artistic weakness—for the Currie hallmark is a guarantee of quality.

Currie throws pop culture a bone with his opening number “A Man With Nothing to Do,” a well-crafted, upbeat tune with refreshingly unpretentious lyrics which progress from ennui to hopefulness: “Let the years go by, let the daylight die/ I can’t think of anything to be/ The planes in the sky, the lines in the road/ Human hands make everything you see/ And if you keep busy in your mind do you think / you’ll see this through?” The final pronouncement of this song is the most unabashedly romantic statement of the album: “I’m a man with nothing to do / But wait around to fall in love with you.”

“Can’t Let Go of Her Now” is another peppy number featuring a classic Currie dilemma: this speaker is reluctant about his need for a particular relationship; while the melody is straightforward, however, the lyrics are poetically sophisticated, even if they do echo a certain Beatles’ tune: “Just don’t tell her I would die if I let her slip away/ Let her think I’m resigned/ Like those drying clothes just hang onto the line.” “At Home Inside of Me” also features a simple upbeat tune supporting complex imagery which, in this case, is rather surprising and morbid at times. The persona behind this song imagines the multiplicity of human experience residing within himself, as in the following quote, which may be one of the most wonderfully bizarre images to appear in pop music: “Armies of children and ghosts of suffragettes/ Make merry in the cauldron of my chest/ Bodies dumped in ditches and stowaways at sea/ They make themselves a home inside of me.”

“You’ll Always Walk Alone” is a rousing tune which jadedly undermines the intention of rousing tunes such as Carousel’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (also an English football anthem); here there is no god and human connections are limited: “Arm in arm and hand in hand, tied together with a wedding band/ Tethered to the line between the phones/ Remember you’ll always walk alone.” The song works well as a bleak reflection on human isolation, but Currie perhaps compromises this vision with a final verse which feels tacked on to appease listeners: “And alone every night you walk through my mind/ There we go, you and I in tandem all the time/ Our cover’s blown, now it’s all talk/ How you always walk alone.”

“Anywhere I’m Away From You” and “As Long as You Don’t Come Back” are what I will call classic Currie “good riddance to a bad relationship songs,” while “Ready to Be” represents the “I’m really a bad ass” genre. “The Fight to be Human” is an extended meditation on the woes of the world, which has become a standard feature of Currie’s ouevre, although this song does not simply repeat the ideas of its precursors such as “Nothing Ever Happens” and “No, Surrender”; this epic points inward as well as outward, considering how the author has tried to deal with the mess that is human life, unabashedly admitting “I hate the world they gave me.”

“The Way that it Falls” and “Baby, You Survived” feature gorgeous string orchestration of the kind witnessed on Currie’s first solo album “What is Love For”—but by far the most interesting track on this album, musically speaking, is “Everyone I Love.” The title is misleading, for this song is not about love at all; it continues the idea from “Ready to Be,” that “I’m ready to be the devil they’ve been seeing in me,” as the speaker plans to unleash pent up hostility and play a twisted emotional game which people sometimes play: “Tonight I’m gonna hurt everyone I love/ just to see if they love me/ I’m gonna run around running off my mouth,/ be as cruel as I can be.” “Like Dr. Frankenstein I’ll let the monster walk/ from the cellar to the town” is an appropriate image, as the complex rhythms and dark sounds of this number feel like a tango in a haunted house. With its terribly honest lyrics and meaty electric guitar, “Everyone I Love” is a guilty pleasure of the first caliber.

The Great War is indeed about war: strife between people in romantic and familial relationships, the struggle to make sense of the world in which we live and to be a “good person,” the desire to express one’s feelings, even if they are not palatable to all. In this album Currie has once again shown that he is a solid tunesmith and transcendent lyricist who is not afraid to think and engage deeply with the “dark side,” even under the false guise of a harmless pop album.

Remaining 2010 US Tour Dates for The Great War:
06.17.10 - New York, NY, Joe's Pub
06.18.10 - Boston, MA, Paradise
06.19.10 - Philadelphia, PA, Tin Angel
06.20.10 - Washington, DC, Jammin’ Java

reviewed by Rachel Wifall

"You'll Always walk Alone"

Justin Currie, What Is Love For (Rykodisc, 2007)

Del Amitri fans are ecstatic that Justin Currie, former band front man, has released his long-awaited solo effort What Is Love For—even if the album is a rather glum affair. Glum it is…but brilliant.

Most of the album deals with the emotional stages which ensue romantic breakups: from thwarted desire to lament, anger, disillusionment and detachment. In a long-held Currie tradition, the final number, “No, Surrender,” is a wordy litany of condemnation of the ills of modern society, with a cynical conclusion: “Should you stand and fight, should/ you die for what you think is right/ So your useless contribution will be remembered?/ If you’re asking me I say no, surrender”—so, the bitterness continues, taken from personal concerns to the level of social consciousness. However, Currie’s is bitterness with substance, carried along by gorgeous pop melodies; call it “pop with an attitude,” if you will. Currie is a songsmith in the tradition of the Beatles, and his indebtedness to John Lennon shows through, especially in “If I Ever Loved You.” He is also one of the most clever and inventive lyricists of our time and carries this all off with that soothing and yet deeply emotive vocal quality which is immediately recognizable to those who appreciate his music.

Currie is a versatile songwriter, although much of his varied work has gone by relatively unnoticed. Bouncy tunes like “Roll to Me” and “Always the Last to Know” (still quality pop material) and romantic ballads such as “Tell Her” and “Be My Downfall” made Del Amitri known to the public; however, the Dels could also seriously rock out and were great with folk rock, country-tinged ballads and, later, electronica—which even most hardcore Dels fans didn’t know what to do with (now there are live recordings of favorite Del Amitri standards on their My Space page. After the Dels’ last effort Can You Do Me Good? (2002) was not released in the U.S. and the band was dropped from Mercury Records, Currie and band mate Iain Harvie continued to write and record material, but they ultimately disbanded—at least for the time being. Currie then, as he says, basically got drunk for a few years, but he also worked with fellow Scotsmen Jim and Kevin McDermott on hilarious tongue-in-cheek pop satire, as The Uncle Devil Show, and he collaborated on the soul project Button Up. In the meantime he put together his own material, aided by friends like Harvie, as his fans monitored his progress on My Space.

Currie is a man of contradictions. He loves to foster a cynical and arrogant public persona, and nowhere does this come through better than in “Still in Love”:

Lovers leave their traces like
Jets across the sky
They find in each others’ faces lines
They recognize
My keepsakes have their places—
At the back of a drawer or slipped between pages and stuck on a shelf
But I’m still in love with nothing
But myself.

However, in person he’s quite gracious to his fans, and he’s shown this at recent shows he’s played to intimate crowds in the UK, New York and Los Angeles. On the limited-edition autographed lyric sheets which were delivered to the first 500 people to purchase his new album, Currie signed his name with a smiley face: five hundred smiley faces from the man with the acid wit, who staunchly prohibits emoticons on his My Space comments—now who is the real Justin Currie: a poseur or hypocrite? His fun is, most likely, in keeping the public guessing.

Not all is gloom and doom on his new album; there are lessons learned through relationships gone bad:

Maybe I was not the one
But I had to try
And in the end there’s no such thing
As wasted time

I was the interim between
Nothingness and him,
So how is that a crime?

Nothing, however, brings this collection of songs to the point of levity; evidently, Mr. Currie got his jollies out with The Uncle Devil Show’s A Terrible Beauty, in 2004, as he sang of cross dressing and his love for Gilbert O’Sullivan. Those who know Justin know that his marvelously dry sense of humor will surely reemerge on the next album, or so—or in sidesplitting My Space blogs. In the meantime we can all deliciously wallow in sorting out past disappointments and mining the question “What Is Love For?”

What Is Love For, released by Rykodisk, can be listened to in its entirety and purchased through Lala.com on Justin Currie’s My Space page. It will be available in U.S. stores on October 23.

Reviewed by Rachel Wifall